The Woodcutter (20 page)

ii

The buzz came sooner than she expected.

Three days later at half past four in the morning, to be precise. She picked up her bedside phone and dialled. Proctor answered instantly.

‘Tried to slit his wrist, miss,’ he said. ‘And as they took him off to the hospital wing, he kept saying your name.’

‘I’m on my way.’

She walked through the shower to wake herself up. As she towelled dry, she glimpsed herself in the full-length wall mirror. There was, she thought, a great deal more to her than her prison outfit promised. If Homewood could see her like this, the poor man would probably burst out of his trousers!

She excised the narcissistic thought, pinned up her hair and pulled on her prison kit.

She arrived at the prison at the same time as Homewood. He’d been told first about the suicide attempt, of course, but he had slightly further to come. She’d heard he had wanted to live close to his place of work but his wife had insisted that, in choosing a home for herself and her three children, other considerations came first. Alva sympathized. Homewood’s devotion to his job probably meant he took it home with him. That must be bad enough without having the looming gothic reality of the place just around the corner.

He said, ‘You were right.’

It sounded as much an accusation as a compliment.

Proctor was waiting for them.

As they walked with him towards the hospital block, he told them what had happened.

‘He got into bed at lights out, settled down, seemed to go to sleep, but some time in the night he slashed his right wrist with a razor blade. Normally he’s a very restless sleeper, and he’s been a lot worse lately, tossing and turning all night, sometimes just lying there with his eyes wide open like he didn’t want to go back to sleep. Fortunately Lindale was on duty. He’s got a good nose for anything different and it struck him that Hadda was lying unusually still, so he took a closer look.’

‘How the hell did he get a razor blade into bed with him?’ demanded Homewood.

Proctor said woodenly, ‘Looking into that, sir.’

Alva guessed he was thinking, If we ran this prison on my lines, not yours, there’d have been a lot less chance of this happening.

On admittance to the hospital block, they found the doctor waiting for them. His name was Martens. According to his own account, he’d been a star student and he couldn’t disguise his sense that fate had played him a dirty trick by leaving him high and dry as a prison doctor in early middle age. He was certainly no great fan of forensic psychiatry, but her first glimpse of him this morning was reassuring. He had the weary, irritated look of a man eager to get back to his bed rather than the sad resigned expression of someone who’s just lost a patient.

‘Oh good. You’re here at last,
Doctor,
’ he said in the faintly sneering tone with which he always used her title.

Homewood frowned and asked brusquely, ‘How’s Hadda?’

‘Hadda is fine,’ said Martens. ‘In fact, he might well have been fine even if he hadn’t been found till breakfast. Despite what one may glean from sensational literature, wrist-slitting is a pretty inefficient way of committing suicide. Most people slash, as Hadda did, across the wrist, and few go deep enough to get to the artery. If your blood is normal, the body’s pretty efficient at sealing up a severed vein. Opening it up longitudinally rather than laterally gives you a much better chance of success . . .’

‘But he’s going to live?’ interrupted Homewood impatiently.

‘Oh yes,’ said the doctor. ‘Still, I suppose it’s the thought that counts.’

‘Is he conscious?’ asked Alva.

‘Indeed he is. He became quite agitated when I tried to sedate him. He’s mentioned your name several times,
Dr
Ozigbo. Not always in the most complimentary of terms.’

He said this not without satisfaction. Clearly, in his eyes, for a psychiatrist’s patient to attempt suicide was prima facie evidence of failure.

And in mine . . .? she asked herself.

She moved forward into the ward. Homewood was going to follow her but she put her hand on his chest.

‘Just me,’ she said.

Hadda was watching her as she approached his bed. He looked pale so far as it was possible to tell on that scar-crossed face. His right wrist was heavily bandaged but it was the ungloved hand that drew her eyes. It was the first time she’d seen it plain. She understood now why he usually wore the black protective glove. The absence of two fingers was a disfigurement more startling than the facial scars or even that suggested by the eye-patch.

He said, ‘Come to gloat?’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘Don’t play not understanding,’ he said. ‘Everyone’s entitled to an I-told-you-so, even psychiatrists.’

‘You need to spell it out, Wolf,’ she said. ‘What is it you think I told you so?’

His gaze drifted away from hers and his expression froze as though his facial muscles were resisting his brain’s command. Then, with a perceptible effort of will he brought his eye back to focus on her face.

He said, softly at first but with growing strength, ‘Everything they said about me at the trial, the paedophile trial, I mean, was true. And a lot more besides. I know the dreadful things I did. I know the dreadful person I was, the dreadful person I still am. I’ll spell it out to you, and verse, if that’s what you want. I know it, I admit it, I acknowledge it.’

Now she saw his eyes filling with the tears that she’d been hoping to see from the start of her involvement in his case, but the sight filled her with pity not pleasure.

Whether it was her pity or his pain that made things unbearable she could not know, but now he broke eye contact with her and turned his head away and buried his face in the pillow. But he was still talking and she lowered her head close to his to catch what he was saying.

Distant, muffled, half sobbed, half spoken, she made out the words.

‘Help me . . . help me . . . help me . . .’

Book Two
The Beautiful Trees

Ich habe die friedlichste Gesinnung. Meine Wünsche sind: eine bescheidene Hütte, ein Strohdach, aber ein gutes Bett, gutes Essen, Milch und Butter, sehr frisch, vor dem Fenster Blumen, vor der Tür einige schöne Bäume, und wenn der liebe Gott mich ganz glücklich machen will, lässt er mich die Freude erleben, dass an diesen Bäumen etwa sechs bis sieben meiner Feinde aufgehängt werden.

Mit gerürhrtem Herzen werde ich ihnen vor ihrem Tode alle Unbill verzeihen – die sie mir im Leben zugefügt – ja, man muss seinen Feinden verzeihen, aber nicht früher, als bis sie gehenkt werden.
^*

Heinrich Heine:
Gedanken und Einfälle

*
I am the most easygoing of men. All I ask from life is a humble thatched cottage, so long as there’s a good bed in it, and good victuals, fresh milk and butter, flowers outside my window, and a few beautiful trees at my doorway; and if the dear Lord cares to make my happiness complete, he might grant me the pleasure of seeing six or seven of my enemies hanging from these trees.

From the bottom of my compassionate heart, before they die I will forgive then all the wrongs they have visited on me in my lifetime – yes, a man ought to forgive his enemies, but not until he sees them hanging.

1

The ruts on the lonning up to Birkstane Farm were frozen hard.

Even at low speed, the old Nissan Micra advanced like a small boat in a rough sea and Luke Hollins, its driver, winced at each plunge into a new trough. His only consolation was that if the track hadn’t been frozen, he’d have been walking through ankle-deep mud for a quarter mile. On the other hand it might have been wiser to walk. As a country vicar with four parishes to cover, he couldn’t afford serious damage to his suspension. Not in any sense. Four parishes, one stipend. The Church of England in the Year of Our Lord 2017 did not require its priests to take a vow of poverty. No need when it was a built-in condition of the job!

In sight of the house his way was barred by a rickety old gate. He got out, forced it open a few feet and decided to walk the rest of the way. As he approached he could see signs of the attack that had brought him here. Smashed windows roughly patched with squares of cardboard, scorch marks up the barn door, and across the wall of the main house in red paint the words
Fuck off peedofile!

Was there anything he could have done to stop this? He doubted it, but he still felt guilty that he’d found reasons to put off visiting his new and controversial parishioner ever since news had run round the area two weeks earlier that, seven years after Fred had died, there was a Hadda back in Birkstane.

No one had gone out to tie yellow ribbon round the old oak tree.

Jimmy Frith, landlord of the Black Dog and the kind of conservative who made Torquemada look like an equal-opportunities counsellor, spoke longingly of the rack and the stake. Many of the local women whipped themselves into a frenzy of indignation. Even Hollins’ wife, a determinedly counter-traditional vicar’s spouse, made it clear that in this case she was at one with the Mothers’ Union. Hollins himself had acted disappointment, but beneath his plea for compassionate understanding he couldn’t suppress an instinctive sympathy with the scripturally endorsed view that the best treatment for paedophilia involved millstones.

Then the previous evening at a parish council meeting he’d learned that twenty-four hours earlier a gang of young hotheads had mounted an attack against Birkstane with a view to letting Wolf Hadda know he wasn’t wanted.

‘Would have burnt the barn down, and not much bothered if he were in it,’ said Len Brodie, his churchwarden, father of three daughters. ‘Only that sudden hail shower put the fire out and sent them scuttling back to the Dog. Daresay you’d call that divine intervention, Vicar.’

He wouldn’t, but he’d certainly felt it as a firm reminder that the cure of souls did not contain any opt-out clauses.

So now he approached the vandalized house with the reluctant determination of Roland coming to the Dark Tower.

Tentatively he tapped on the solid oak of the front door.

There was no sound from within and he’d raised his fist to deal a firmer blow when behind him he heard a deep-throated growl.

He spun round and found himself confronting a big man with a deeply scarred face not improved by an empty socket where his right eye should have been. His right hand was missing two fingers and his left leg looked as if it had been removed by force and stuck back on with plastic filler.

He noticed the ruined hand because the man’s remaining fingers were wrapped around the handle of a tree-feller’s axe, and the ruined leg because the man was stark naked. Alongside the damaged leg, and presumably the source of the growl, was what looked like a wolf badly disguised as a Border Collie.

Stepping back so quickly he collided with the door, the vicar exclaimed, ‘Jesus Christ!’

‘Wolf Hadda,’ said the man. ‘Glad to meet you, Mr Christ. Thought for a moment you might be one of them yobs, come back for more.’

‘No, I’m sorry, my name isn’t . . . I mean . . . I was just a bit surprised . . .’

He caught a gleam of amusement in the man’s one eye, which was a relief. Mockery was fine. It came with the job. Axes were something else.

Recovering he said, ‘I’m Luke Hollins, your vicar. I thought I’d drop by to see how you were settling in. I’m sorry about this . . . it’s youngsters who can’t hold their drink . . .’

He gestured towards the graffiti and the broken windows.

‘Just letting off a bit of steam then?’ said Hadda. ‘With Jimmy Frith stoking the boiler, I’d guess. It’s still Jimmy running the Dog, is it? How he’s survived as his own best customer for forty years, God knows. It was always a high price to pay for a pint, listening to him putting the world to right. Do they still call him Jimmy Froth?’

‘Not to his face,’ said Hollins. ‘Can we go inside, Mr Hadda? You’re looking a bit cold. Do you always walk around naked?’

‘No. I was just taking my morning shower. I get my water piped from the beck behind the house, but it comes in such a slow trickle it’s quicker to step outside and wash at source. There’s a little fall I can sit under. I heard your car and after the other night . . .’

He turned away round the side of the house, swinging the axe and burying its head in a chopping block as he passed. He did this one-handed with an ease that made Hollins glad he hadn’t done anything to provoke attack. If ever that did happen, best strategy would be to run, he decided. The man’s damaged left leg seemed to be locked at the knee, producing a laboured rolling gait. That, combined with the facial disfigurement, should have produced a totally ogreish effect but, walking behind him, Hollins found himself enjoying the play of muscles in that broad scarred back. He dropped his gaze to the tight smooth buttocks, then quickly raised it to the sky.

Careful, boy! he admonished himself. You’re a happily married C of E parson!

Inside, the house wasn’t much warmer than out. There was a log fire laid in the open fireplace in the kitchen.

Hadda said, ‘Stick a match in that, will you? Sneck, lie by.’

The dog settled down across the hearth, producing the deep growl once more as Hollins gingerly reached over him to light the fire. It caught quickly and he sat down at the old table and took in his surroundings.

The room didn’t look as if it had changed much in the last couple of hundred years. There were ham hooks in the black ceiling beam, the small window panes had swirls and gnarls in them, and the woodwork had that bleached, weathered look you only get from long use or large expense. The rough plaster on the walls followed the swells and hollows of the granite stones from which they were constructed. Almost at ceiling height an ancient bracket clock hung from a six-inch nail driven into the crack where two stones met. Below it a shorter nail driven into the same crack supported a lettered sampler rendered illegible by an accretion of cobwebs. The room’s furniture consisted of a square oak table that looked as old as the house, a trio of kitchen chairs perhaps a couple of centuries younger, and a bum-polished rocker by the fire. The twentieth century was represented by an ancient electric oven and the twenty-first by a streamlined jug kettle standing by the sink.